You don't need a Perl one-liner for this, you could use expand instead:

The expand utility shall write files or the standard input to the standard output with characters replaced with one or more characters needed to pad to the next tab stop.

The expand utility will even take care of managing tab stops for you and that seems to be part of your "with no effect on the visible spacing" requirement, a Perl one-liner probably would't (but I bet someone here could provide a one-liner that would).